I recompiled PHP, with same options as last time, same version, but –with-curl added to the end of the options string. I got this error. So, the only change was the –with-curl-option. I tried without it, but no, same error. The result? libphp5.so was not compiled correctly, and PHP was not working…

The culprit turned out to be that libcurl and libxml was not compiled with different GCC versions, so they did not play well along. It was fixed by running an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. However, I’m a bit baffled by the fact that PHP was not working even when compiling without CURL… I’m not sure why it did not work when compiling without curl, since no other changes were made to that box…

Oh, and to make it even better: PHP claims its not their problem… They could atleast give a bit more informative error message. But my suggestion is to ensure that all your libraries is up to date. The culprit in this case was libxml2 and curl, but it might be other libraries next time…

<?php
$num_posts = 5; //Number of posts to show.
require('wp-blog-header.php'); //WordPress configuration. Change if you don't place this in the root of your wp-installation
$sql = "SELECT `post_excerpt`,`post_title`,`user_nicename`,`user_url`,`$wpdb->posts`.`ID` FROM `$wpdb->posts` INNER JOIN `$wpdb->users` ON `$wpdb->posts`.`post_author` = `$wpdb->users`.`ID` WHERE `post_status` = 'publish' ORDER BY `$wpdb->posts`.`post_date` DESC LIMIT 0,$num_posts";
$arr = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
foreach ($arr as $posts) {
$permalink = get_permalink($posts->ID); //Function to get permalink.
$string = $string . "<h1 class=\"blogheading\"><a href=\"$permalink\">{$posts->post_title}</a></h1> <p class=\"blogauthor\"><a href=\"{$posts->user_url}\">{$posts->user_nicename}</a></p><p class=\"blogexcerpt\">{$posts->post_excerpt}</p>";
}
echo $string;
?>


You can see a demo here. I don’t use excerpts on my blog, so nothing will be shown for the excerpt. Feel free to use as you want. A nicer version of the source can be seen here.

Update: I changed this to show the permalinks.